Conference wrestling tournaments Saturday

Jacksonville wrestling coach Brandon Akins called February “championship month.” His counterpart at Croatan, David Perry, said “everything happens” this month, which really begins today for the guys in the singlets.

Jacksonville wrestling coach Brandon Akins called February “championship month.” His counterpart at Croatan, David Perry, said “everything happens” this month, which really begins today for the guys in the singlets.

All three area conferences hold their tournaments today, and while there’s a clear-cut favorite in the East Central 2-A Conference at Northside High — Croatan, which has claimed 13 straight tournament titles — the other two aren’t so easy to handicap.

Can defending champion Jacksonville win the Coastal 3-A Conference again? Or will West Carteret follow its unbeaten run to the league regular-season title by winning the tournament at West Craven High?

And who’ll emerge atop the Coastal Plains 1-A Conference tournament at East Carteret High? Dixon and Southwest tied for the league title, which means the team that finishes the highest today will earn the CPC’s No. 1 playoff seed.

Don’t think that matters? Think again. Whichever team earns the No. 1 seed out of the CPC opens the state dual team championships Tuesday night against a wildcard foe while the CPC’s second seed faces a No. 1 seed.

“That’s why I was saying it’s kind of big (to earn the No. 1 seed),” Southwest coach Charlie Dempsey said. “You never know who the wildcard is going to be, but typically you feel like you have a better shot.”

Whatever happens, it should be an interesting day on the mats for the area’s 10 high school wrestling teams, with as many as six having a good shot at being in the state dual team playoffs. Those pairings will be announced Monday.

Here’s a look at each individual tournament:

Coastal Plains Conference

Dixon coach Dal Tomlinson altered his lineup fairly substantially last Saturday at the CPC super duals to give his Bulldogs their best shot against the Stallions to earn a share of the league title with a victory.

And it worked. Dixon, which lost to Southwest 34-30 in the league’s first five-team super dual weekend, downed the Stallions 33-30, meaning both teams finished 7-1 in the league.

Will he do it again?

“Weeelllllllll,” Tomlinson said, “that’s a loaded question. I will do what I can do as a coach to put them in a situation to place higher.”

However, he added a footnote to his strategy.

“I would say both of us probably will do a lot less moving around than we would have,” he added.

And what about Dempsey, who basically stayed with the same lineup the second time around against the Bulldogs?

“I have been working on that for 24 hours. I had scorebooks out, I had everything. I had a headache crunching numbers, and in almost every scenario we were very, very, very close,” he said Thursday night.

Page 2 of 4 - “But we came up with scenario and a lineup we think works best for us. It just comes down to how our guys go out and execute it. Like I told these guys, every point counts, every pin you can get counts; if you can get a major, that’s going to count. Every little thing is going to count and they just need to be aware of that and go out and perform.”

On that, Tomlinson agreed wholeheartedly.

“An individual tournament takes really the pre-match coaching out of it. So this type of a situation truly puts it all on the kids. So I feel bad for them because there’s more pressure on them that we can usually absorb,” Tomlinson said.

“I tell my kids all the time if I tell them to go to a certain weight and they go out there and mess up, they can blame it on me. But at this point Saturday is pretty much, for both sides — I’m not speaking for Southwest’s coach, but for both of us it’s pretty much we put them out there and it’s really going to be up to them.”

Southwest, which beat out Dixon 179.5 to 161 to win last year’s tournament, has four defending champions: Joby and Lance Armenta, Nick Cameron and Zach Winegardner. Dixon has three: Tyler Bradley, Seth Schoonover and Tyler Hudson.

East Central Conference

No matter how you look at it, Croatan is the team to beat in the ECC tournament. Along with having won every league tournament since it joined the league in 2000, the Cougars are 97-0 in ECC dual matches.

And in going 7-0 in the ECC this season, Croatan had an average margin of victory of just over 50 points, with its closest league match a 40-26 win over Topsail. No other ECC team was within 30 points of the Cougars, who have won two of the last three 2-A dual team titles as well.

Even Perry had to admit the obvious.

“I guess we’d have to be the favorite just because we won the regular season. But I’m sure the other teams are aiming at this would be a good chance to knock us down a notch,” Perry said, with a chuckle.

A year ago Croatan rolled up 357 points to claim the tournament title while Northside was second with 250.

Given all that, how does Perry approach a tournament in which the Cougars are the prohibitive favorite?

“We don’t talk about it a lot because our kids this year have been pretty self-motivated,” he said. “But we have talked about the fact that the conference has improved. Topsail and Swansboro and Northside all have some really good wrestlers. So since it’s an individual tournament just about everybody’s going to have some tough matches in their weight class.”

Page 3 of 4 - But Perry said he felt the Cougars were “peaking the right time,” and no one’s on the sideline with an injury.

“We’ve got a lot of guys that are starting to wrestle their best, especially some of our younger guys. We’re happy about that, and we’ve got everybody back now. It’s the first time in two months that we’ve had everybody,” he said.

Still, this is both a team and individual tournament. How does Perry balance that?

“We’re still trying to pick up points,” he said. “Any time there’s something involved as a team, our guys are all about it. We kind of focus all of our stuff around the team. At the end of the year obviously there’s individual honors out there to be won, but they’re still running up to me even at the state tournament last year, ‘How about the team score, coach?’ They want to know where we’re at.”

And don’t think the Cardinals have forgotten that a 38-33 loss to West Carteret — at home, no less — kept them from winning a second straight league title.

Not that Akins wanted to go there, however. Revenge? There’ll be no bulletin board material here.

“The thing I stress to our guys (is) we want to worry about ourselves,” he said. “All the teams in our conference are pretty tough and all of them are going to be going after the same thing that we are.

“If we sit back and try to worry about what other people are going to do, that will be our shortcoming. We’re going to worry about what Jacksonville needs to worry about, and that’s ourselves, and see what happens in the end.”

Akins said he’ll take the same approach at the conference tournament as he does at any tournament, which is first pushing each of his 14 wrestlers to win their opening match. That, he said, is key.

And then, he added, to be aware of what’s going on with their teammates.

“Always be aware of what’s going on with the rest of the team. If you’re in a situation where you can get a pin, you’ve got to go for the pin, trying to get those extra team points because in the long run it’s going to add up,” Akins said.

Page 4 of 4 - After closing out the regular-season conference schedule with lopsided wins over White Oak, South Central and West Craven, Akins feels good about his team.

“We’re as ready as we’re going to be,” he said. “The guys have been working extremely hard. February comes around, this is championship month for us. All of us are looking for good things, starting with the conference and we we’ve got state duals starting next week.